Leather Journals for Christmas pressies

If you are a member of my family STOP READING right now or this will spoil your surprise!!! Having spent this year learning and practising bookbinding I decided to create leather journals for the families Christmas presents. It is not always easy to decide what to get people especially when we often only see each other occassionally and I wanted gifts that were created with the most special gift one person can give another TIME.

My journals were created using the most wonderful shade of red leather it was advertised as Paprika but I think it is a little more like Cranberry which was perfect for Christmas. As ever the binding is Long Stitch. I decided not to colour the thread as I thought it would look more distinctive in the natural linen as a contrasting colour. Spine detail showing the longstich binding

Before Closure is added

Inside the book

I struggled for some time about the closures for the journals, not having had much practise and not wanting to wreck an otherwise tidily finished book, I took the lead from Kiley and made the leather wrapping strap a totally seperate piece, this also gave me a way of adding initials to the books, without risking ruining the book if I made a hash of the stamping. The strap wraps all the way around the book and then up behind the strap so that only the smooth face of the leather shows, rather than the suede side.

Finished journal with closure

Detail of the name emboss stamped into the closure strap

I am very pleased with how these turned out, especially as they were the first full sized leather books I had made. I just hope the family will like them as they took several hours each to make.

Best wishes and thanks for reading

Billie 🙂

PS Experimenting a bit with the blue backgrounds added later to the images, not sure if it works, leave me a comment to see what you think. I still need to work out how to remove more of the orignal background.

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Billie :)

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